Route 455
by Vbabe11
Summary: An AU- Victor hates the bus. Or he did. but when a round faced girl climbs aboard, his opinion changes forever.  CyborgxRaven


He hated the bus. Smelly, crowded, and cheap. He was big fan of auto mobiles but out of all the things that went VrOOM, he loathed buses.

So when Victor was forced to climb aboard and join his fellow commuters one Wednesday afternoon, he was notably upset about it. His car wasn't working again and he had to get to the shop before it closed. He collapsed into a spot that didn't look too disease ridden near the back and pressed his feet up against the empty seat in front muttering and pulling his jacket around him. For the first few minutes of the trip all he did was count the number of stops and glare out of the dirty window at the passing construction and boutiques.

For the forth time on this trip, the bus slowed to pick up a few weirdos and drop off a few more. It was at this stop outside a large mom-and-pop coffee house with an ornate steel bird above the entrance that he saw her. She was just standing there on the corner staring straight down at her shoes. Her face was hidden except for a rounded chin by a black hat that sat snuggly around her sharply cut purple hair.

For some reason she stood out and Victor found himself sitting up when he realized that she was getting on the bus! The bus he was riding!

For a few seconds as the girl climbed aboard, she was hidden from the angle he was sitting. It took so long for her to reappear that Victor thought he had been mistaken and he panicked she might have been going around instead of on. But in a moment, sure enough, a girl wearing a long sleeved shirt and jeans rounded the toll and sat five rows ahead and to the left of him. From this angle and just before she sat down, he could see she had a round face to match her chin and a solemn stare not fit for a young girl. She had tight pouting lips and incredibly pale skin that bordered on a slate gray tint. But there was something behind the way she moved that spoke volumes.

When she sat down and pulled something out of her backpack he didn't stop staring at the back of her head. After another stop or two it occurred to him that he really didn't know why. She wasn't necessarily pretty in any classic sense. Her clothes seemed plain other than the fact that they were on the dark side (almost, gothic?), which helped to emphasize the vibrant saturated plum hair crisply clipped to the nape of her neck. He guessed she was about his age and the thing she had pulled from her back pack was a large and clearly over-read book. Despite all the warning signs that this girl was a loner, Victor spent the rest of the trip watching the way the rumble of the bus made her slender shoulders bob and sway against the seat.

What was wrong with him? A Gothic bookworm? She wasn't even DOING anything. Still, he wondered what she was reading. And where she was going. From the way she sat there it looked like she didn't care if this metal trap carried her to the end of the earth. And at the moment, he didn't really care to leave either.

The puffing sound of the bus exhaled again as it growled forward and it awoke Victor out of the fifteen minute dream he had been on to the fact that they were pulling away from his stop.

On instinct, he scrambled up and made his way clumsily to the front of the bus, which luckily halted for him to get off, momentarily forgetting the girl as he passed her. As his clean white sneakers hit the stairs downward, He remembered again and looked up. The bus driver had stopped the vehicle awkwardly in the road- it was too late to change his mind now without looking like an idiot. He made a distracted attempt to turn and see her face but he couldn't find it in time before he was released onto the sidewalk.

Once he was a few feet away and the bus gave another shuttering gasp of black exhaust. Victor looked back through the windows to see he could catch one more glimpse of the mystery girl- but all he could see was the blinking number of the bus route- 455.

He wrote it down.


End file.
